I am thinking about buying a HD / DVD recorder such as the Sony RDRHX510 advertised on the John Lewis website.

Can anyone tell me:

1 If I use re-writable discs, can I just use them over and over again, in part of whole ( a bit like using a floppy disc on a computer)?

2 Does anyone have experience on this particular model? I would look at the equivalent Panasonic, but I have had a bad experience with a DVD of that brand and there is a long thread on here about them.

3 This model has a 80BG hard disc - how many hours worth of TV can I record on that?

4 Are most commercial DVDs copy protected in some way?

Any other advice welcome! Thanks

usually re-writeables require formatting before use again, you cant usually just over-write on them, (formats can take from 1 hour to 7/8 hours depending on the machine/disk)

Personally, i have never tried this model, but i like Sony..

most commercial DvD's are copy protected in some way yes...

I have a Panasonic HD recorder and have never had any problems with it at all. Unfortunately it won't write to RW discs, but the benefit of having a hard drive means you just keep programs you only want to watch once on the HD and then delete then, or record anything you want to keep to DVD-R

Based on my Panasonic, 80 gig will give you anything from 17-100 hours of recording time depending on what quality level you use. Based on getting 2 hours on a recordable DVD, mine gives me 40 hours.

Which is a lot!

I use an fairly old PANASONIC E50, no hard drive but it records to DVD-R and also the great DVD-RAM disks, same capacity and file format as -/+RW disks, and no formatting needed, just erase the disk or program which takes 5 seconds, and re-use. DVD-RAM only plays back on PANASONIC machines though, so useful only for time-shift recording.....has that 'time-slip' feature so you can watch the start of the program, or any other one on the disk, while carrying on with recording on the same disk....amazing.....